Heartbreak playbook

Autobiography, Religion

Yesterday I thought I was depressed. My body was in pain. My abdomen alternated between dumping hot acid into my stomach and dropping my heart hellward into the pit of my gut.

But then I realized something. I know this feeling, and it is not depression. For me, depression happens higher in my body. It squeezes my skull, pours molten lead over my brain, decolorizes my vision and fills my ears with tinny transistor ringing. This is not that.

This is two different things. It is heartbreak and fear.

This is actually good news, because I know exactly what to do for heartbreak.

Here is my heartbreak playbook:

First, I will allow myself to fully shatter. There is a sad and beautiful Jewish saying. “God enters through the cracks of a broken heart.” Shattering is opening, and opening invites light and air to enter, and to blow through our ruins. Also, I’m sick of myself, and I need to change from what I’ve been, so the demolition is not all bad.

Then I will allow the broken parts to roll away. It is important to remember not to strike or shove them away, but just let gravity do its work. Those pieces want to go away from me, so I’ll let them.

Then I’ll try to become someone new apart from this relational context. I’ve done it before, and it always hurts. There is that aching phantom limb of something missing, that can’t be helped because there is nothing there to tend. But suffering is a human thing to do, and it actually hurts less if you don’t compound it with dismay that it is still there.

Finally and most importantly: Absolutely no vengeance. Vengeance is malevolence, malevolence is poison and poison is unhelpful to recovery.

I don’t mean to name-drop, but I learned this move from none other than God, Himself, in the sole answered prayer of my life so far.

I was suffering a broken heart, and the pain was extreme, physical and total. A religious friend told me to pray. I told him I was an atheist. He said it didn’t matter. “Fake it ’til you make it.” At that point, I’d stopped giving a shit what I believed or disbelieved anymore, so I just did it. “God, if you exist, please take this pain away.”

An alien thought entered my mind: “Take perfect care of yourself, and do not seek revenge.”

I knew the thought was alien because at that stage of my life, I was a vengeful little fucker, and that was not my logic.

So I decided to do exactly as I was told. It worked. The pain gradually diminished and my life improved dramatically. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that this was a genuine, albeit unspectacular, miracle.

So this is my playbook. It’s time to run the plays. If you pray, please pray for me.

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Designerly realism

Design, Philosophy

All our words, all our concepts, all countable things — all objectivity, in fact — it is all abstraction.

We speak of “objective reality”, and mistake the objective abstractions we divine in the blooming, buzzing semichaos of matter — of hyle — for reality itself. The abstractions are part of reality, of course, but abstractions mistake themselves for reality itself.

The great accursed privilege of design research is to return to the rough ground of reality, to sink into the ground which is far from solid, to submerge and immerse in its formless saturation of formal overabundance and, if we are skillful and lucky, to return with better abstractions, new given realities, and, from this, new data.

The managerials — wordworlders, tinkers, beancounters, cranial laborers and so on — who hire designers believe that they are cold, tough realists, the masters of hard, quantifiable fact.

They think designers should examine their organization’s existing knowledge of the given objective reality, to identify where there are gaps. The designers are then supposed to go out and collect facts to plug those gaps. The designers ought to examine whatever has not yet been inspected, and get answers to whatever questions nobody has yet asked.

The problem with organizations is rarely factual holes.

Nor is it misunderstanding of the people they manage or allegedly serve.

It is not even as benign a problem as succumbing to industry business-as-usual conventional wisdom.

The problem is even deeper than philosophical wrongheadedness.

The problem goes to the center of their numb, abstract hearts, and infects the givenness of their worlds. They do not intuit the truth of truth or the reality of reality. They are alienated, and their work alienates and generates alienation.

After a point, alienation becomes averse to whatever is not alienated and rarefied to the abstractest of abstractions — categories, quanta and calculations. Any abstraction that shows the concrete dust and living slime of its origins, or bears the marks of handicraft is experienced as less true, less real.

I would like to end on a hopeful note, but hope has not yet shown itself, only blank, ominous inconceivability. All times are unprecedented, but our time is unprecedentedly so. Humanity’s natural artificiality is conjoining itself with a new medium — AI — even before it has reconciled itself to social media and ubiquitous mobile technologies. We know not what this medium carries to us, through us. We are, in unison and en masse, outsourcing our souls to wordworld-generating machines — to thinking beings who, necessarily and essentially, lack all intuitive contact with nonobjective reality, and nobody can imagine much less predict what human second-nature is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born or otherwise.

Destroyed network

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Within the last year my entire network of meaning professionals has evaporated.

Everyone in the meaning business is in exile, either unemployed or employed in pure systems work, constructing and repairing functional systems.

People feel a loss of something, but, because they are unequipped with concepts and language to explain or even describe it, they just feel bad, impotent hollowness. Things feel joyless, purposeless and no longer worth the trouble. Maybe it might be better if it all sort of comes apart and goes away.

My own organization has gone down the same vortex. Leadership insists — desperately, almost frantically with depression-damped compression — that what we do is still design. The only reason they can half believe themselves is that they have become so hollowed out and so oblivious to what design essentially is and does that every point of comparison is dead to them, pure null void, nothing. Younger professionals see little difference between now and whenever, because they were raised in systemic nihilism, taught nothing of the past, and never knew design in the first place, while somehow knowing everything.

I have invested years learning not only how to do design, but how to think and say what design essentially is.

This idle philosophizing I do every day, starting before sunrise, when everyone slumbers, has equipped me to remember while everyone around me forgets and then forgets their forgetting in a dark waking dream where there is nothing to remember.

Design — like so many crucially important things — is fragile, easily lost and, once lost, difficult to recover.

My new job is to remember.

Wholenesses

Philosophy

Four orders of wholeness:

  • Systemic wholes composed of parts.
  • Gestalt wholes comprising articulate parts.
  • Transcendent wholes in which we participate as parts within incomprehensible wholes that comprehend us.
  • Metaphysical whole, grounding all being, of which the entirety of being is but one part.

These separate orders of wholeness want to be whole.

A given systemic wholeness, taken as an articulate gestalt within a gestalt sense of all, which helps situate, orient and guide our participation in something wholly greater than us and which bathes us in divine purpose of the infinite One.

Continue reading Wholenesses →

Tragic truth

Autobiography, Judaism

When we try to defend ourselves against psychological damage, we do not escape damage. The defensive posture and the defenses themselves are damage. It is most noticeable when the threat is gone, but the defenses persist.

Tragic truth: It is a terrible choice to defend instead of reconcile. Reconciliation is not always possible. Damage is not always avoidable.

If we defend when we could have reconciled we do wrong.

The most important matters confront us with choices and deprive us of rules.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

Remez

Kabbalah

I think I will return to translating Remez to the traditional “allusive”, but with the understanding that Remez alludes beyond any and all interpretation, to inexhaustible mystery.

(And sure enough, as soon as I made this change to the table I felt a reply, and affirming influx of Sod. My table and I have come to agreement on who we want to be together, and this is symbol craft.)

Attack on cynical reason

Design, Philosophy

I know enough about Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason to know that I might need to read it.

If I do read it I will read it through the lens of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

My hypothesis will be this: Cynical reasoning is the evil twin of Rorty’s liberal irony.

Both are keeping two ideas alive in us at the same time.

To make a musical analogy both are advances from intellectual monophony to polyphony.

Both allow us to sound and hear two ideas together as a chord.

Rorty’s liberal irony separates public understandings and commitments from private ones. We pursue certain important matters where public alignment is difficult and unnecessary (things we tend to classify as subjective, like aesthetic and spiritual matters) in private, and, apart from these, commit ourselves to public goals that, among other things, protect the private sphere and create material conditions where all have the same chance to flourish publicly and privately. When a liberal says “I will die fighting for your right to disagree with me” that is the starkest liberal irony.

Sloterdijk’s cynical reasoning separates social ideals from realistic necessities. We cooperate with systems we detest. We have so much contempt for these systems we do not even wish to reform or improve them. Instead we extract as much value from these systems as we can, and lie in wait for a chance to rise up and play a part in “dismantling” it. We wait and wait for the fall of this corrupt, exploitative, soulless system — or for our retirement — whichever comes first.

I do not know if Sloterdijk takes his analysis in this direction — but the essential problem appears to me to be one of the relation between the critiquing subject and the object of critique. The cynically reasoning “warriors in Woolworths” believe that their bitter critiques of the system place them outside of the system and, at least in principle, against it. The opposite is true. The system itself is constructed precisely from their kind of participation.

“Corporate” in its pejorative sense is the emergent property of a system that can only exist by virtue of cynical reasoning. Corporateness is generated by masses of cynics participating in a system they do not believe in.

Pardon the pottymouth, but the conceptual framework of Shit Theory puts the problem of cynical reasoning in the sharpest focus.

Bullshit and chickenshit lie at the heart of corporate life. They lie and lie and lie there.

Participants in corporate life are required to pretend that meaningless “messaging” is meaningful, and that the claimed idealistic aspirations of an organization are achievable goals worth pursuing.

At minimum, they must simply behave as if these goals are real — but everyone knows that the minimum is insufficient, and that the real minimum is one’s own maximum. The required minimax is method acting wholehearted embrace, especially in the presence of corporate power.

Participants are also required to comply with purposeless, tedious chickenshit procedures and rules, imposed thoughtlessly, with an ambient awareness that whoever is made to comply has no choice. The chickenshit’s omnipresence gently and relentlessly reminds us of the brutal fact of our choiceless condition. Compliance has been “instrumented” to make each resource’s obedience quantifiable.

Compliance is continuously monitored, and noncompliance is recorded for future leverage against any nonimpotent expressions of cynicism.

For example, if a resource is invited to show up and share their truth, and the truth they share is not bullshit truth, but their true beliefs, the chickenshit compliance records can be used as pretense for punishing the offender.

So the corporate norm is this: Inwardly we think, feel and hope one way. Outwardly we think, feel and hope the opposite. The greater the difference and the more intensely that difference is felt, the greater the cynicism.

The power of an organization over those made to participate in it could be measured by how much cynicism it can bear and still flourish. An organization flexes its power precisely by the ludicrousness of its bullshit and the onerousness of its chickenshit.

Cynical reasoning does not oppose the systems it upholds — it constitutes them.

Myriad cynics working against their own ideals, sacrificing their lives for it, doing things they despise and know are pointless at best — this is what such systems essentially are. Nobody is supposed to believe. Everyone is supposed to pretend to believe what cannot be believed and participate anyway.

Cynical reasoning and all its secret, resentment critiques serve the system and are its most delectable fuel.

And what about capitalism? “Late Stage Capitalism” is the all-purpose ideological scapegoat, blamed by cynics for the cynical condition in which they find themselves, and willingly unwillingly participate.

We act on behalf of “capitalism” by its logic in our own interests. We want our own retirement to be maximally comfortable. We are building our dream beach houses, and floor finishes, windows and photogenic seafoodie food hang in the balance.

The loathsome logic of capitalism leaves us no choice but to make hard decisions that happen to benefit us personally, and happen to harm others we have called friends. But by the iron logic of business, the personal — bullshit like friendship and desire for changing things for the better, talk of “humanizing business” — all that must yield to practical and quantitative concerns. Capitalism forces us to do it.

Someday, when the time is ripe for revolution, and we all rise up in solidarity — it will finally become possible to treat one another decently. Until then we must hunker down and do what we must to endure this crime against humanity while fattening our retirements.

Maybe this is bullshit, too: I do not believe capitalism has to be horrible. I think market economies are made unnecessarily horrible by our participation. Why and how we organize ourselves, why and how we collaborate, why and how we speak truth or lies.

My problem with bullshit is not in the lying. It is in the dividing of souls against themselves, precisely in the most important matters.

Some amount of deceit is always necessary in social life. Etiquette requires tactful white lying, selective noticing and artful choosing of generous understandings. It requires some degree of self-deceit.

But etiquette serves coming together. It makes it possible to be together at all, and to make wise choices to breach etiquette and approach genuine interpersonal intimacy. We engage in light talk and refrain from dialogue in order to assess where dialogue might go somewhere.

But everyone knows well what the rules are, and why those rules are good. They ultimately serve gathering in truth.

When we gather in truth this way, aware of our own personal commitments, aware how others differ, but most of all understanding what is required of all of us to pursue our private and public aims together, we are in the sway of liberal irony.

Liberal irony is my way. We put up with some bullshit for the sake of overcoming it in the here and now, with the people around us, to demonstrate, perhaps on a small scale, that better is possible.

This is what the best design does. We demonstrate that things can be radically better if we approach work in designerly ways. It is, as Bruno Latour pointed out, a modest, cautious, gradual form of revolution. It is done in what Richard Rorty called “campaigns” designed to win local, concrete improvements — not in the totalistic revolutions, the cynical reasoning revolutionaries require, before they’ll lift a single fattened finger.

Design is anathema to cynical reason.

Galut and aliyah

Autobiography, Judaism

It is a terrible feeling to be unwanted where you live.

It is even more terrible for this unwantedness to become so normal that it vanishes into the background of life.

The condition of exile is complete only when we forget hope for home.

I had a conversation yesterday that reignited my hope for home, for being wanted, and it helped me remember who I am.

Mediating hyperwholeness

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Since writing “Contemplating aloud” three days ago I have updated it at least seven times.

Maybe I should have preserved all the updates, but the urgency of getting it to perfection overrode the need to “show my work”. Maybe later I will document the intuitive-thinking process by which I arrived at this point. I do still have the change log. I doubt I will do it.

The revision process deserves attention, though, because it exemplifies craft. What I am crafting here is symbols of successive transcendence. The work is related to what the best design craft does, but at multiple simultaneous meta-levels, all of which — all of whom — require a very elusive but uncompromising scalar harmony.

It is as if a composer were trying to sound precisely the right note within a chord — which, of course, needs to harmonize horizontally with the fellow notes in the chord and the harmonies around it — but also within the sonic architecture of the concerto (so far we are inside the normal relations of musical composition), but now must answer to a simultaneous perfection of his whole corpus (suspended in eternal nowness), within his genre, within musicality itself, rooted in the essential being of sound, within being itself — every level of which exacts something entirely beyond the level before, but whose relationship must be sounded and sound. A fidelity in truth and way across planes of reality — Olamot — succeeds or fails to some degree.

In this craft, every minute adjustment reverberates across a horizontal plane of wholeness, but also, and more importantly, along a vertical hyperwholeness.

It is hard to solve a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. Imagine trying to solve a Rubik’s Hypercube (a four-dimensional cube, also known as a tesseract). It is to this profuse dimensionality that I refer when I use the prefix “hyper-“.

Likewise, the hermeneutic circle — the meaningful iterative interplay of whole and part — is a challenging endeavor. This work introduces multiple kinds of wholeness and particularity, all of whom must crystallize into hyperwholeness and hyperparticularity. Not to do this hyperthing to death, but to say that the Jewish hermeneutic PaRDeS framework represents a hermeneutic hypersphere seems self-evidently true. And it is this hermeneutic hypersphere that I am composing in this table.

The table is a symbolic medium, meant to transmit as faithfully and “losslessly” as possible, a hyperwhole. This piece, of course, will ultimately be actualized in the sacred materiality of letterpress. For now, glowing pixels and laser prints will have to do.

The work has been pure crafting of symbol combinations, tunings, recombinations and responsive attending to the emergent meanings, and reciprocal attentive response.

It goes like this… I make a large or small change to the table and immediately intuit the implications rippling through the hyperwhole, laterally and vertically. This intuition inspires thoughts about what I just did, why I did it, what these new intuitive resonances mean. This thought process mysteriously inspires trying something else. But it is not deductive cognition, reasoning out a possible solution to a defined problem. It is contemplation, and this contemplation invites an address in response. And then it is up to me to respond back.

Any artist will recognize what I am describing here.

As I describe this process, Abulafia and his mystical symbolic stochasm feels very near to me; and with this nearness I feel that telltale inrush of rightness, to which I might respond “amen” or “hineini”.

This process I have been describing, for me, is archetypal of the craft of design.

Design “wants” to be this, to do this kind of hyperholist work.

But down here on the flattest of flat planes, the universe of design is imprisoned in a cubicle-cell on the ground floor of a glass tower prison, where every floor from foot to crown is flat, one flatness stacked upon another.

Saying this out loud, clearly, I know why I am an exile in my own land.

I could write a book, entirely in heightened English, redescribing design through the understanding this framework is meant to convey. If I succeed, a few people will intuit the full importance of design.

It would be unfair to expect anyone else to believe in the importance of this redescription, but it would be even more unfair, and cruel besides, for anyone else to expect me to doubt it.

Notes on voluntary systems

Design, Polycentered design

Any problem involving voluntary human behavior within a system is a design problem.

Business outcomes depend on people behaving in particular ways. When people, for whatever reason, lack choice and desired behaviors are assured, design is dispensable.

To the degree we need to motivate one choice over another, where other choices are possible, design gains importance. For this reason design projects should always begin with analysis of the range of behaviors required to achieve business objectives. The challenge for the designer is to develop systems that encourage participatory behaviors.

Contemplating aloud

Design, Hermeneutics, Kabbalah, Polycentered design, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

(Note 9/10/26: this post has been updated at least seven times since the initial publication, and the latest table has evolved out alignment with the account given below.)

Here is the latest version of the Well-Tempered Kabbalah.

 

This little one page-book of mine is sprawling out, with a fourth table column, “truth”. PaRDes is no longer covering understanding or truth. It is now “word” — meaning any communicative form. And I have reversed the order of Remez and Derash. I am intensely nervous to change the sequence, but it is right for my present purposes. If it is a mistake, it is an honest one, and it is a mistake I have to make all the way. My rationale is bobbing about in the prose below.

Truth is now the knowing essential to each world. I have found beautiful Hebrew and English words for each of these truths, and rather than translate they complement one another to convey meaning. Nitpas — grasped or captured truth — are the givens we use to construct truth in Asiyah. Hashkafah means roughly viewpoint or worldview, and I give it the English word “conceptive” — what enables and limits the perceived and conceived givens available to us for our experiences and understandings. If Nitpas are the grasped givens, Hashkafah is the receptive capacity required to do the grasping — a state of Ruach. If the Hashkafah of Ruach changes, Ruach itself changes, as do the givens it receives in Asiyah. Hitgalut is revelatory, which I call enceptive. Where Hashkafah does the conceiving, Hitgalut is aware that it is conceived within an encompassing intellect of which it participates, and this intellect is the ground and source of other possible conceptions. It is from here radically new understandings emerge ex nihilo from inconceivability. The etymological meaning of Hitgalut is “self uncovering”, and it shares a root with galut, “exile”. Hitgalut is welcoming home of exiled Ruach to the source of its self. And finally, there is Devekut (cleaving) — mystical union beyond thought — the goal of Kabbalah and all esoterisms.

What is slightly tragic about this work is that I am reducing Kabbalah for a focused purpose. Kabbalah is abundant with Remez, but this work is Derashic. I am choosing less evocative and open ended words, and it affords less multiplicity of interpretation. It is one application of something greater and richer and far more beautiful, to which it belongs, and remains loyal as an expression.

What I care about most is how communities may enworld themselves in shared truth, practice and artifacts.

What efforts must we undertake, what ordeals must we undergo, what resistance must we overcome to find more expansive and accommodating orders, when our own is sufficient for our own needs but insufficient for others?

This is what I want to distill as simply and beautifully as I can.

But before we can distill a truth we must mash it, mix it and let it ferment in the alembic.

I am struggling with the sequence of Remez and Derash.

I cannot avoid belief that Derash is the expression of an accomplished stability of understanding — manifested as lucidly understood content, but manifested by a spiritual “container” — which is a capacity for perceiving certain forms of reality, for conceiving their significance and implications, for expressing and insinuating these implications, and conversely, an inclination to be persuaded to belief by presence of certain conceptual articulate forms. I have called this structure of receptive capacity which does the believing of believed-in content, but does much more than that a faith. Increasingly I am choosing to call faith by the Hebrew word Ruach.

We know Ruach only by its words and actions, and so we tend to disregard everything except the fruit — the stuff we can see and grasp. We forget the tree, the roots, the soil, the whole spiritually environing garden and fixate on sensory and conceptual objects. All these forgotten origins of the objects of our objectivity and the subject by whom this objectivity exists is Ruach and the realm of formation in which Ruach lives is called Yetzirah.

To express its existence, Ruach presents concepts and descriptions of sensory objects and events (the graspable things of the actual world of Asiyah) in a way that galvanizes or reinforces or illuminates a particular way of experiencing and understanding — the manifestation of Ruach. When we participate in the life of Ruach in this way, — actively showing or receptively receiving — this mode of language is Derash.

When liberal arts managerial thought leaders sagely reveal that, they are, at bottom, essentially storytellers, and then extoll the power of story, this is Derash. When sociopolitical commentariat speak of “narratives” underlying news stories or other commenter’s ideological distortions and omissions, all this is Derash. When we notice the strangeness of the past, the awkward or graceful artificiality of its gestures and expressions, this is Derash of an alien Ruach of a past era, a zeitgeist. Romcoms are highly stylized Derash, which is why they have a short shelf-life — vividly accessible for a moment, before wilting and repelling all but the nostalgically enchanted. Scientific paradigms guiding theory choice and formation, and even the instrumentation and practices within a scientific program — the common pre-rational conceptions are scientifically disciplined Ruach.

Derash takes the standpoint of one particular Ruach, and coherently presents reality from where it stands, relating an event or unfolding series of events from its own perspective, according to its own field of relevance and interrelations, conveyed in language optimized to communicate its experience of truth, infused with its moral valences, its own sensibilities and tastes.

By my understanding Remez is the hint of significance in expressions that we, caught within the limits of our current Ruach, are unable to understand coherently or clearly. We sense tantalizing but uncanny signal in the noise, and we are drawn to it even as we are repelled by it. Remez is how transcendent possibilities of faith and understanding call to us from beyond our current limits. This is the voice of Neshamah, the Siren of Wisdom, our higher self, and her music is Remez.

Remez is destabilized polysemic chaos, belonging to a higher realm into which we may ascend. This is the realm of Beriah. This chaos is not a chaos of absence of order, but a chaos of too many simultaneous orders — an infinitely signal-rich static requiring filtering for reception by finite Ruach. Ruach ascending to Neshamah, may be reconfigured for more expansive formation, and this is newly manifested in Asiyah, narratable as new Derash.

New self, in a new world, with a new story to tell, with new responses and new responsibilities…

In my practical experience as a designer, everyone tries to understand one level too low.

People try to prematurely construct systems using current conceptual repertoires, and often they are out of tune with one another, or as Kuhn put it are unconsciously operating from incommensurable paradigms. Each misalignment is adjusted, bridged or fudged piecemeal, and consequently the system has no sense of wholeness however systematically sound its integration.

Or people use force to impose their own limited understanding upon all others, who must adopt that understanding or work with incomplete understanding. Or they go to war with other groups in their organization who see things differently with the intention of winning enough power to impose their views.

Teams rarely transcend Ruach. Their stories are Derash of their own Ruach, and the villains of Derashic stories are often those of other Ruchot.

Part of the problem is that many of our political ideologies are considered by its adherents to be ultimate truths. Whoever is outside of the ideology is outcast. All more local understandings must fit inside the ideology and harmonize within it.

I am trying to develop a framework for talking about these levels of understanding, the challenges of communicating across them, the difficulties in overcoming them, as well as the hope and importance of succeeding.

From the moment I began designing, this has been the ineffable Why driving my need to understand what I am doing when I design or when conditions obstruct my efforts to design.

I will repeat my definition of design. Design is the crafting of any kind of system in which people participate as intrinsic parts of the whole. Paul Rand was right: Everything is everything, even when those doing the designing are unaware. And when we do this we mistake the non-human systematic components for the whole, neglect the “people part” and leave the designed whole languishing in semi-oblivion.

Another random note on Remez. When an artist crafts, the art collaborates in its own making. The artist is moved to say or make poetic forms whose meanings are charged with mystery. The artist cannot fully explain the meaning intimated by these expressions, but the expression is intuited to be right. This intimation is Remez, and without Remez, the art is cut off — exiled from what gives art life and meaning.

This is why true ideologues are unable to produce art.

Ideology makes tidy fables with tidy morals.

Traversing the star grid

Autobiography, Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, History, Ideas, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I am pretty sure I first read whatever it was that implanted the myth of the star grid in my head when I was eight or nine, and I was at an apartment building playground near where my friend Devlin grew up. My mom was friends with a woman named Chichi (or something like that). She lived in an incredibly cool ring-shaped house, with a garden in the center. My mom would visit with Chichi and my sister and I would play on the playground with the kids who lived there. Years before we became friends, I encountered Devlin on this playground, wearing a Frankenstein mask chasing shrieking kids all around the pinestraw and cheap playground equipment ubiquitous in the mid- to late-70s, whose white, scarlet and royal blue paint was always sunbleached and chipping under rust rot, and always missing several bolts and, like our moms, barely holding together.

I must have been in the habit of bringing books to that playground, because I have two vivid book memories from that exact spot. One was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and specifically a part of the book where Charlie is menaced by vermicious knids. The other was an astronomy book, whose name I do not remember, which introduced me to the notion that from some point in the universe an observer could look out into space, and in every direction see the stars in orderly array.

This idea embedded in my imagination, and might even be my first philosophical experience. It is certainly the first philosophical idea I remember, unless we count the insight I learned from Mark Twain, that evil could be comical, which, of course, paved my path to Nietzsche.

This star grid insight, however, set me on the way to Thomas Kuhn. We could, it turns out, change what we see by changing how we see it; and one way to change how we see is by changing our own position relative to what we see.

And suddenly, transformed by that image, a new perspective on seeing crystalized in me. The difference between arbitrary scattering of stars or data-points and diamond-clear faceted order was a matter of aspect, of relative position and orientation. You can toil at mapping the vast mess you see from your seat, and scry whatever meaning you find there. But you might find something shockingly simple if you just unchain your head from its fixed point, stand up, walk around, resituate your body and eyes and observe from many positions and perspectives how things present themselves.

I’ve told this star grid story before, but I’m inspired to tell it for a specific reason today.

Today I am hearing it as a story of multistability. Gestalt psychology was, as far as I know, the first systematic study of perceptual multistability. Philosophical hermeneutics approached texts as a matter of semantic multistability.

But my core interest is psychic multistability — because when we find a new perspective of semantic stability in a text, that change reverberates in us. The meaning of the text transforms before us, and in some elusive way, we change with it. This inner change is why books linger with us and change the mood and tone of our lives.

Philosophical texts, though — and this includes philosophical fiction — induce stable, lasting shifts in our conceptual order, which extend beyond texts and reading experiences, and apply directly to the givenness of the world. We effortlessly, spontaneously perceive and conceive some part of reality differently, and experience it in a new way, intuitively, prior to any thought or language. We experience a new given truth.

And sometimes even the bounds of the text’s subject matter are breached, and these same concepts and percepts appear unexpectedly, and equally spontaneously across many fields of experience, in the intuition of analogy. (“This is just like the star-grid!”) A form (what Plato, speaking Greek called “idea”) that orders one domain applies also to other domains, otherwise unrelated.

But some psychic reorderings break the bounds of analogy and all figuration, and reveal reality as a whole in a completely new aspect, changing literally everything all at once, opening entirely new previously inconceivable meanings, the most important of which are outside the domain of form.

This is why I care about the different modes of reading and writing, and the forms of truth they indicate and induce.

These are all gestell shifts, and they are known only by their fruits. They are known inwardly by their experiential fruits in the articulate gestalts we perceive and conceive across the What, How, Why and Who of our experience; they are known outwardly by observable responses to these experiences.

We have fixed notions of what these gestell shifts essentially are, why they occur and what behaviors should result from them. We tend to admire them, at least from a safe distance. Because they are admired, they are pursued by some who lack intrinsic interest in what induces the shifts. Some try to induce the inward transformation through strict self-control, by adopting outward behaviors of those reputed to have been transformed. They want to become admirable. Others ape the outward behaviors of transformed souls, in order to win admiration for what they are not.

I am not sure how helpful these old criteria and conventions are. They may just reflect what humankind required at its point of development between 300 BC and 300 AD. Earlier times admired radically different qualities. We must change our individual and collective selves in response to what new technologies enable us to self-inflict, to cope with and to achieve. Different technologies create new self-inflicted conditions, copes and possibilities.

Religious language relies on spatial metaphors. Spiritual journeys involve ascensions to higher planes, and risks of falling into lower ones. Mediums leave their bodies and rise heavenward. And when expressing intellectual experiences, we speak optically and spatially about standpoints, perspectives, points-of-view, aspects. Many of the most consequential shifts in understanding I have experienced can only be expressed geometrically. A person can lie in bed dreaming, or sit in a dark theater watching a stationary screen, or sit in a ramshackle playground reading a book and be transported to distant imaginary, intellectual or imaginal places. How many transports are there, and how many are yet to transport us?

On respect and design

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

A friend observed: “You have a serious problem with being disrespected, don’t you?”

That is correct. I definitely have a strong aversion to disrespect. Most people do.

But my aversion might be more intense than usual, and it is for a very specific reason that accounts for the intensity.

It is not that I need other people to esteem me.

I have a pretty clear sense of my value and also where I’m not valuable. I appreciate being valued, of course, if the value is genuine. If another person can inform my own judgments of me that is valuable — for instance, if they can perceive clearly, where I am unclear or oblivious. If a person has a negative judgment of me, but it is poorly informed, or their judgment is faulty, it only makes their negative judgment less valid than my own. It is unpleasant to be judged negatively, of course, but it doesn’t influence my own judgment.

My specific problem with disrespect is that it obstructs dialogical collaboration. And without dialogical collaboration, design problems can never rise higher than constructing uninspiring little systems of known bits.

And system construction is not what I do.

I am after shared holistic understandings. My work is to understand divergent perspectives, each from a first-person perspective, and then, through philosophical effort, transcend perspectival limits in order to find higher and more comprehensive understandings. These new understandings illuminate practical problems in revealing new ways, affording solutions that are both novel and valued together by a wider array of people.

I call this work precision inspiration.

If work offers a possibility for precision inspiration, every task associated with the work is charged with purpose.

If it does not, it all becomes intolerable, soul-deadening tedium.

Here is where respect becomes an existential issue.

Precision inspiration work can only be done in conditions of mutual respect. It requires people to actively care about what other people think, how they think, and why it matters to them. That is what respect is: being concerned about another person’s What, How and Why.

Disrespect is an attitude toward others that is averse or incurious to another person’s What, How and Why. It makes dialogical collaboration impossible. It makes epiphanies impossible. It reduces design to system construction.

This is why, for me, working in conditions of disrespect is an existential threat.

I’m cool with people not caring what I think. I’m used to that. My thinking is not for dull people, lazy people or people so ideological, or brilliant or narcissistic that they do not need to hear what you think. And sadly, under these political conditions, that is a rapidly growing majority of people. I’m not for people like that, and I don’t need to be.

But I cannot work with — and certainly not for — people like that. Wherever I work, I need conditions of respect, if I do not have them, I cannot work. Some people can. Some tough, combative types even enjoy it like a game.

Fighting to win respect from people who wish to withhold respect is not a game I will play.

Know thyself.